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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (sometimes transliterated
Dostoyevsky, Dostoievsky, or Dostoevski listen (November 11 1821 – February 9 1881)
is considered one of two greatest prose writers of Russian literature, alongside
close contemporary Leo Tolstoy.
Dostoevsky's works have had a profound and lasting effect on
twentieth-century thought and world literature.
Dostoevsky's primary works, mainly novels, explore human psychology in the troubled
political, social and spiritual context of his 19th-century Russian society.
Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his
Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous
"underground man", was named by Walter Kaufmann as the "best overture for
existentialism ever written."
 Early
life
Dostoevsky was the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky's father was a retired military surgeon and a violent alcoholic, who
served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. The hospital
was situated in one of the worst areas in Moscow. Local landmarks included a
cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants.
This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young Dostoevsky, whose
interests in and compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented was apparent in
him. Though his parents forbade it, Dostoevsky liked to wander out to the hospital
garden, where the suffering patients sat to catch a glimpse of sun. The young
Dostoevsky loved to spend time with these patients and hear their stories.
There are many stories of Dostoevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children.
After returning home from work, he would take a nap while his children, ordered to
keep absolutely silent, stood by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted at
any flies that came near his head. However, it is the opinion of Joseph Frank, a
biographer of Dostoevsky, that the father figure in The Brothers Karamazov is not
based on Dostoevsky's own father. Letters and personal accounts demonstrate that
they had a fairly loving relationship.
Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, Dostoevsky and his brother
were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at St Petersburg. Fyodor's father
died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by some that he was
murdered by his own serfs. Reportedly, they became enraged during one of his
drunken fits of violence, restrained him, and poured vodka into his mouth until he
drowned. Another story holds that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring
landowner invented the story of his murder so that he might buy the estate
inexpensively. The figure of his domineering father would exert a large effect upon
Dostoevsky's work, and is notably seen through the character of Fyodor Pavlovich
Karamazov, the "wicked and sentimental buffoon" father of the four main characters
in his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky was an epileptic and his first seizure occurred when he was 9 years old.
Epileptic seizures recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoevsky's
experiences are thought to have formed the basis for his description of Prince
Myshkin's epilepsy in his novel The Idiot, among others.
At the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering, Dostoevsky was taught
mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by
Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Though he focused on areas
different from mathematics, he did well on the exams and received a commission in
1841. That year, he is known to have written two romantic plays, influenced by the
German Romantic poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller: Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov.
The plays have not been preserved. Though Dostoevsky, a self-described "dreamer" as
a young man, at the time revered Schiller, in the years which yielded his great
masterpieces he usually poked fun at him.
Beginnings of
a literary career
Dostoevsky was made a lieutenant in 1842, and left the Engineering Academy the
following year. He completed a translation into Russian of Balzac's novel Eugénie
Grandet in 1843, but it brought him little or no attention. Dostoevsky started to
write his own fiction in late 1844 after leaving the army. In 1845, his first work,
the epistolary short novel, Poor Folk, published in the periodical The Contemporary
(Sovremennik), was met with great acclaim. The editor of the magazine, the poet
Nikolai Nekrasov, walked into the office of the liberal critic Vissarion Belinsky,
and announced: "A new Gogol has arisen!" Belinsky, his followers and many others
agreed and after the novel was fully published in book form at the beginning of the
next year, Dostoevsky became a literary celebrity at the age of 24.
In 1846, Belinsky and many others reacted negatively to his novella, The Double, a
psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego overtakes his life.
Dostoevsky's fame began to cool. Much of his work after Poor Folk met with mixed
reviews and it seemed that Belinsky's prediction that Dostoevsky would be one of
the greatest writers of Russia was mistaken.
Exile in
Siberia
Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned on April 23, 1849 for being a part of the
liberal, intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle. Tsar Nicholas I after seeing
the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe was harsh on any sort of underground organization
which he felt could put autocracy into jeopardy. On November 16 that year
Dostoevsky, along with the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced
to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood
outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoevsky's
sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labor at a katorga prison
camp in Omsk, Siberia. Dostoevsky described later to his brother the sufferings he
went through as the years in which he was "shut up in a coffin." Describing the
dilapidated barracks which, as he put in his own words, "should have been torn down
years ago", he wrote:
"In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were
rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall...We were packed
like herrings in a barrel...There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it
was impossible not to behave like pigs...Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the
bushel..."
He was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian
Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a private (and later
lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion, stationed at the fortress of
Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan. While there, he began a relationship with Maria
Dmitrievna Isaeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia. They married in February
1857, after her husband's death.
It is popularly believed that Dostoevsky's experiences in prison and the army
resulted in major changes in his political and religious convictions, and that
after his ordeal he became disillusioned with 'Western' ideas and began to pay
greater tribute to traditional Russian values. Perhaps most significantly, he had
what his biographer Joseph Frank describes as a conversion experience in prison,
which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically Orthodox, faith (the
experience is depicted by Dostoevsky in The Peasant Marey (1876)). While conversion
plays a strong role in many of his works, not all his characters arrive at
Christianity in a moment of crisis (notably, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov is
converted through the example of the good works and moral teachings of Elder
Zosima.) Although we cannot assume with authority that Dostoevsky's prison ordeal
was the sole catalyst for his dramatic shift in views and style, this explanation
parallels his own semi-autobiographical description of prison life in The House of
the Dead.
Whether inspired solely by his prison experiences or for reasons known only to
himself, Dostoevsky was a sharp critic of the Nihilist and Socialist movements of
his day, and in part dedicated his book The Possessed and his The Diary of a Writer
to espousing conservatism and criticizing socialist ideas. He later formed a
friendship with the conservative statesman Konstantin Pobedonostsev embracing some
of the tenets of Pochvennichestvo.
While Dostoevsky's post-prison novels abandoned the European-style domestic
melodrama and quaint character study which characterized his youthful work, this
might also have been the result of his maturation and growing confidence in himself
as a writer. Dostoevsky's mature fiction explored themes of existentialism,
spiritual torment, religious awakening and the psychological confusion caused by
the conflict between traditional Russian culture and the influx of modern, Western
philosophy.
Later
literary career
In December 1859, Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg, where he ran a series of
unsuccessful literary journals, Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch), with his older
brother Mikhail. The latter had to be shut down as a consequence of its coverage of
the Polish Uprising of 1863. That year Dostoevsky traveled to Europe and frequented
the gambling casinos. There he met Apollinaria Suslova, the model for Dostoevsky's
"proud women", such as Katerina Ivanovna in both Crime and Punishment and The
Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, which was followed shortly
thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts
and the need to provide for his wife's son from her earlier marriage and his
brother's widow and children. Dostoevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting
gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.
Dostoevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion as well as from its
consequences. By one account Crime and Punishment, possibly his best known novel,
was completed in a mad hurry because Dostoevsky was in urgent need of an advance
from his publisher. He had been left practically penniless after a gambling spree.
Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with
his publisher Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would have claimed
the copyrights to all of Dostoevsky's writings.
Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos
abroad, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted to rekindle a
love affair with Suslova, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was
heartbroken, but soon met Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, a twenty-year-old stenographer.
Shortly before marrying her in 1867, he dictated The Gambler to her. This period
resulted in the writing of what are generally considered to be his greatest books.
From 1873 to 1881 he published the Writer's Diary, a monthly journal full of short
stories, sketches, and articles on current events. The journal was an enormous
success.
Dostoevsky is also known to have influenced and been influenced by the philosopher
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Solovyov is noted as the inspiration for the
character Alyosha Karamazov.
In 1877, Dostoevsky gave the keynote eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet
Nekrasov, to much controversy. In 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous
Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow. From that event
on, Dostoevsky was acclaimed all over Russia as one of her greatest writers and
hailed as a prophet, almost a mystic.
In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for a long time at the resort of
Staraya Russa, which was closer to St. Petersburg and less expensive than German
resorts. He died on February 9 (January 28 O.S.), 1881 of a lung hemorrhage
associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. He was interred in Tikhvin
Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St Petersburg, Russia. Forty thousand
mourners attended his funeral.1 His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto
you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if
it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph
of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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